Saturday, 8 March 2014

A snowy park, a wintry spin - and the joys of no longer being a flabby teenager

It’s not the kind of issue that normally preoccupies me while
I’m cycling. But, glancing down at my bike computer, I could see my pace had
dropped. Where shortly before the average speed figure had been showing
16.5mph, it was now showing 15.1. The dip gave me fresh determination. “Speed
up!” I ordered myself. “Reach the top of the hill without dipping below 15!” A
few seconds later, I crested the hill in ProspectPark, near my house in Brooklyn, with my computer still showing a 15mph average
speed. Slipping my chain onto the biggest chainring, I sped up off down the
hill towards GrandArmyPlaza.

This wasn’t my normal kind of bike riding, however. I’d seen
earlier in the day the forecast for yet more snow for New York City – it’s already the city’s
seventh-snowiest winter on record – and I thought my chances of commuting by bike
in the next few days were limited. I consequently decided, although I didn't have anywhere to go, to use a break in the weather to get some exercise. Checking that I had no immediate domestic
responsibilities, I slipped off after church for a very brief bout of cycling
purely for the physical activity.

I’ve found myself, when I’ve been undertaking these rides, involved
in an activity that’s both entirely familiar to me and rather alien. I’m used,
of course, to riding my bicycle (even if this winter has made that hard-going
at times). I’m accustomed, however, to focusing on getting where I’m going in
one piece – which can be demanding in a city full of angry drivers and bad road
surfaces. I’m not used to focusing on the cycling – or its effect on my body –
for its own sake.

A clear road amid deep snow: how Prospect Park has looked
for much of this miserable, long winter

I’ve been interested to discover how negative many of the associations in my mind of taking pure exercise are. As my
pulse rises and my breath grows wheezier, I’m back amid the humiliations of a
secondary school playing field. I feel the scorn of the teachers and my fellow,
marginally less inept pupils for my uselessness at playing rugby union. As
steely-faced weekend road warriors pass me, their wheels making the distinctive
rumble of expensive carbon-fibre, I feel fat, lethargic and more than a little
silly.

This isn’t to say I’ve never cycled just for the sake of it
before. My love for cycling developed substantially during my years at St AndrewsUniversity, when I’d ride off some
Saturdays or Sundays towards Crail, Anstruther or one of the other nearby
fishing villages. The whipping coastal winds would propel me one way. Then,
after I started heading back, I’d have to dip my head down into the wind and speed along the quiet, undulating country roads across the moors.

That early, carefree exploration culminated in the summer of 1990, when I alternated between
working at clearing out my recently-deceased grandfather’s house and spending days
exploring Scotland. I’d head off in the morning for a ride that took me up the
shore of the Gareloch – a ride made spookier by the area’s hosting the
tightly-secured base for the UK’s
nuclear missile submarines. I’d head back to Glasgow
via the shores of Loch Lomond. I’d ride,
pushed by the prevailing winds, from Glasgow to Dunfermline in the morning. Then I’d push down hard on
the pedals and hunch down for a long ride back – via the Forth Road Bridge and into the wind - west.

"It's nice out here," remarks my bike during a rare trip outside
New York. "Why don't we do this more often?"

I didn’t find things too complicated back then. I wore no
helmet, carried no supplies, rode a very basic Raleigh bike and worried about pretty much
nothing. Caught in a tropical-style West-of-Scotland summer downpour? Dry
yourself off under the hand dryers in the lavatories at lunchtime. Bit off more
than you could chew with this 100-mile ride? Stop in every other village for a
pint of milk to glug down.

I’ve had occasional bouts of just-for-the-sake-of-it riding
since then, albeit the time constraints and obligations of adult life have
curtailed them. When I lived in London, I’d occasionally
make it to RichmondPark – the vast royal park in south-west London - where rides are enlivened by the possibility of a collision with a big, wandering deer. Last
summer, with the family absent, I took two long rides over New
York City’s boundaries, over into New Jersey
and up into Westchester.

Bored with just riding round the park in circles?
Why not ride round it on a tall bike, like this guy?

But there’s something about riding in circles in ProspectPark
– Brooklyn’s smaller equivalent of Central Park,
non-New Yorkers – that feels far more self-consciously like Exercise - or Training, as it's now been rebranded - than any
long trip to the different scenery out of town. The other riders in ProspectPark mostly wear the set, grim
expression of a person battling to wrest back top spot on some Strava segment.
Most seem to form a spooky unity of body, bike and clothing. Shoes merge into
pedals, gloves into handlebars. The helmet might as well be some final,
elaborate cap on top of the whole bike, rider, clothes ensemble, rather than a
separate piece of clothing.

No-one would make that mistake with me. I arrived in ProspectPark last Sunday wearing woollen
trousers, a cotton shirt and leather shoes. My waterproof jacket, trouser
straps, helmet and gloves were my only cycling-specific clothing. And, of
course, I was not wearing my clothes over a body honed by constant training for
some forthcoming triathlon. I carry about in my body the evidence of thousands
of late nights at work, followed by dashes home and swallowings of hurried
dinners with wine. My clothes and body were both as floppy and
aerodynamically-inefficient as many other riders’ were taut and tight-fitting. I look what I am - like a cyclist whose rides are nearly all, in sports cyclists' dismissive term, "junk miles".

That self-consciousness only rose as I started to ride,
heading down the hill towards Flatbush, and sped along the road between the
lake and the parade grounds at the park’s lower end. It became clear as I
started climbing the hill – the ridge over which British
and American forces fought the battle of Brooklyn
in 1776 – that I was making an effort. I started to breathe hard and wondered why I
always seem to have a cold. I briefly felt myself once again 15 and on a
mud-spattered, rain-soaked cross-country run.

Me - and my body - in The Bronx. There are
no excuses for my beer belly,
so I'll make none.

And, as I powered up the hill, I remembered that I was no longer entirely
the unfit, unco-ordinated teenager. While my flabby torso isn’t much of an
advert for commuter cycling, it sits atop a pair of legs that have spent years propelling
me to 4,000 miles or more a year of riding first through South London and, now,
daily between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Even if some of the weekend
warriors overtake me on a climb, I generally gain the occasional, minor victory,
pumping my legs up the hill past one of them.

I started to feel the pleasure of how a bicycle magnifies one’s
effort. Pumping my legs, I climbed the hill smoothly by my standards, at around a
steady 14mph. Down the hill, my biggest gears propel me to close to the park’s
25mph limit and I felt the childish sense of joy that always comes with giving
oneself over to gravity’s acceleration. I started to feel a deep sense of contentment - the result, I imagine, of the release of endorphins, the exercise-related high that
people keener on exercise for its own sake chase so hard.

I realised after a while that that feeling of contentment wasn't unfamiliar. I recognised how much of the time when I’m riding I’m running late,
pushing myself to reach the next lights before they turn red, powering up the
Manhattan Bridge to avoid being late for a meeting, switching to the big
chainring to get uptown faster, accelerating away from traffic lights to get
out of the way of that badly-driven taxi.

There’s no immediate danger of commuter cycling’s turning me
into a lean, efficient cycling machine like the ones whirling efficiently round
Prospect Park each weekend. But, as I turned out of the park again and prepare
once again to tackle the indifferent conditions of New York City’s streets, there was no
doubting that I was feeling better.

I appreciate with my higher brain centres the many more and
practical reasons why more and safer cycling would make the city a better
place. But the deep satisfaction that I felt flooding through my body reminded me that, no matter how deep my embarrassment, I retain a childish joy at the
simple act of riding a bicycle. The day it starts to fade will be the day I feel as old as I look.

6 comments:

People are training to be better at riding round parks and other such places fast, Steve A, partly so that they can live longer lives of riding round in circles. It's one of those ironies of being a modern human.

Our closest Austin, Texas equivalent is probably the Veloway, down in the southwest corner of town. It's open to cyclists and rollerbladers only, and it's nice, but at 3.2 miles per loop the scenery doesn't seem fresh for long. But I do get the experience you describe of being whizzed past by much lither people in kits. Since I'm always seeing them from behind it reminds me of why it's important to replace your bike shorts periodically if you're going to go chammando.

By Texas standards, winter's been ridiculous here too (we had a hard freeze last week, which is almost unheard of). Here's to springtime soon!

Thank you so much for that entertaining comment - and thank you even more for not accompanying it with an actual picture. I'll confess I've never particularly looked at the behinds of the people passing me - and I'll now have to concentrate on never doing so.

I'd also assumed everyone in Austin except the members of the Texas state legislature was super-cool. So I'm glad to have put that idea out of my mind.

A circuit of Prospect Park is, according to my bike computer, 3.3 miles, so it's about the same as yours on the Veloway. It is, however, a landscape by the architects of Central Park and they reckoned it worked better than Central Park (Brooklynites say). So there are worse places in the world to be going in circles.

I also pile on the "junk miles." For me, I've always approached bike-riding for both the transport & travel aspect, and the sheer pleasure of it. I know I need exercise, and the bicycle provides me with that in spades, but what is the point unless I can enjoy it?

Feel no guilt because you do not approach it athletically. Feel proud that you ride well and can do so for the sheer pleasure of it.

I live in Bergen County (NJ), 45 minutes riding distance from the George Washington Bridge. I hope to meet you one day while bike-riding. It would be fun to cover the distance with a like-minded fellow cyclist.

About Me

I'm a hefty, 6ft 5in Scot. I moved back to London in 2016 after four years of living and cycling in New York City. Despite my size, I have a nearly infallible method of making myself invisible. I put on an eye-catching helmet, pull on a high visibility jacket, reflective wristbands and trouser straps, get on a light blue touring bicycle and head off down the road. I'm suddenly so hard to see that two drivers have knocked me off because, they said, they didn't see me.
This blog is an effort to explain to some of the impatient motorists stuck behind me, puzzled friends and colleagues and - perhaps most of all myself - why being a cyclist has become almost as important a part of my identity as far more important things - my role as a husband, father, Christian and journalist. It seeks to do so by applying the principles of moral philosophy - which I studied for a year at university - and other intellectual disciplines to how I behave on my bike and how everyone uses roads.